Review: What to Expect When You're Expecting

It's pretty much exactly what you'd expect. Elizabeth Banks and Brooklyn Decker feature in this ensemble comedy about pregnancy.

Photograph by: Handout
, Handout

Cameron Diaz, Anna Kendrick and Elizabeth Banks play women struggling to conceive in this big screen adaptation of the bestselling book about pregnancy. Despite the endless genre conventions, this multi-pronged comedy has enough depth of feeling to keep us engaged in the characters, even when it proves to be exactly what we were expecting.

What's next, a feature film version of Dr. Spock's Baby & Child Care starring Tom Cruise as the colicky tot?

Given the way movie studios make decisions these days, it very well could be, because What to Expect When You're Expecting seemed like an equally unlikely candidate for a big screen adaptation.

Heidi Murkoff's bestseller has been the go-to book for pregnant women for 20 years. Outlining everything from stretch marks to spotting, What to Expect When You're Expecting is not narrative fiction.

There are no characters trying to balance pregnancy with work on a reality TV show, nor any young romantics driving a pork truck. Yet, that's exactly what you'll find in the opening frames of this new movie from Kirk Jones (Nanny McPhee) as we watch Cameron Diaz and Matthew Morrison take on the somewhat regrettable role of celebrity dance show contestants.

Jules (Diaz) and Evan (Morrison) are trying to win the big dance showdown before a national audience, but when Jules -- a professional fitness trainer with her own brand of "biggest loser" show -- barfs in the crystal chalice they've just been awarded, her pregnancy becomes front-page news.

Reproduction never used to be a big deal, seeing as we've been doing it successfully for as long as we've existed as a species -- and long, long before that. Yet, in the 21st century, it seems we're so removed from our primal core and the baseline human endeavour of procreation that making a baby has become akin to scaling K2.

Certainly, that's what it feels like for Jules -- a hard body with a hard mind to match. Jules is a self-involved entrepreneur who's always done things on her own, so even if Evan is eager and available to be by her side while her waistline doubles, she's aloof and moody.

The same could be said for just about every female in this ambitiously sappy yarn because in essence, we're really just getting a series of uterine sagas to play out the main points in the book.

• Jules is the woman who doesn't want to slow down, but is eventually sentenced to mandatory bed rest.

• Elizabeth Banks' Wendy is the wannabe mom who finally conceives after years of trying, and finds herself overwhelmed by the physical changes to her once-perfect body.

• Anna Kendrick takes on the single gal who gets knocked up by a pretty boy in a pork wagon.

Indeed, the pork wagon could have had much greater thematic significance, but director Jones doesn't seem too perceptive as he explores the ups and downs of pregnancy.

The female characters teeter on the edge of hyperbole and hysteria for the duration, and while that's probably what pregnant women look like to men, it does little to bridge the gap between the sexes when it comes to parenting.

While the women are set up as alien life forms that suck all the life and joy from those around them, the men are portrayed as victims quietly waiting for castration.

Exactly where the humour is supposed to come from in this equation is anyone's guess, because there's only so much mileage to be gleaned from observation.

Hey, pregnant women are moody and men with pregnant wives or girlfriends are threatened by the imminent arrival of a love rival. Funny, eh?

Not particularly, but Jones does find enough good beats in this contrived comedy to make us care about some of the characters.

Chris Rock does a fabulous job as a father who's happily surrendered his swordsmanship for a sweet family, and Anna Kendrick is nothing short of sympathetic as a 20-something struggling with the possibility of being a single mom.

Banks is the other glowing orb as the married woman who feels increasingly bovine, but tries to put a pretty face on the bad gas and back acne as she gives lectures on the beauty of breastfeeding.

Because so much of the movie is slapstick cliche, the more delicate bits have a habit of getting lost in the excess folds of this creation -- and that's too bad, because screenwriters Shauna Cross and Heather Hach do a nice job with the dramatic scenes.

After all, everything doesn't always go as one might expect when expecting. Tragedy looms over every crib and presentation blanket, resulting in irrational fears forever parking free of charge in the back of every parent's mind.

The best thing about this movie is it understands all that, and even when the execution feels locked in first gear, grinding away at cliche, there's an abstract sense that something truly meaningful is happening.

Smart enough to stay away from the big speeches and metaphysics about life, What to Expect When You're Expecting delivers enough dimensions on the "miracle of birth" to make it accessible, without once straying from the path of genre comedy expectation and a repeated chorus of "push!"